Really enjoyed this "We Didn't Start the Fire" article by Lindsay Zoladz. Here's Billy Joel, via biographer Fred Schruers, on how he wrote the song:
“The chain of news events and personalities came easily — mostly they just spilled out of my memory as fast as I could scribble them down.”
Kind of a fun exercise to think about. Imagine a friend has just woken up from a coma, and you have four minutes to explain the previous forty years to them. Which events do you include? Which major moments escape you? Which insignificant ones sneak onto your list?
With these questions in mind, I thought it might be fun to consider the 117 events and people that Billy Joel chose to represent the stretch from 1949 (the year of his birth) to 1989 (the year the song was written). To measure the historical significance of these events, let's look at how often they've been mentioned in books, as measured by the Google Ngram Viewer. It's not perfect, but it's at least a vaguely objective* way to quantify historical significance.
First, let's look at which historical events/people from the song generated the most book mentions from 1949 until the song's release:

A few technical notes: 1) The Ngram Viewer can't tell us how a phrase is being used, only that it's being used. So if Billy Joel is mentioning the musical South Pacific, for instance, we don't know which written usages of the term "South Pacific" refer to the musical rather than the region/battles/novel/etc. 2) In cases where multiple terms describe the same event/person, I used the more frequently occurring term. So even though the song uses "Communist bloc," the phrase "Soviet bloc" appears more frequently in books and was chosen as the representative term. ("Soviet bloc" also edges out "Eastern bloc.")
Now, let's look at which terms generated the fewest book mentions up until 1989:

This list is all over the map, but it does seem like specific pop cultural items such as "Suicide Solution," "cola wars," and sports references don't see quite as many book mentions.
We can update these lists from our perch in the future-- meaning we'd rerun the analysis but count mentions up through the present instead of up until 1989-- but they don't change much, so I'll spare you the table. (The top 10 stays the same, albeit with some reordering. The bottom 10 sees the entry of "Lebanon Crisis," "Georgy Malenkov," and "Muhammad Naguib" in the 8, 9, and 10 spots, respectively. Out of the bottom 10 in the revised list are "crack epidemic," "Little Rock Nine," and "cola wars.")
One final fun (?) thing to look at is which terms have gained the most relative to their 1989 position. Let's look at mentions since 1989 divided by mentions up until 1989 to see which phrases have seen the most growth in mentions since the song was written:

Notable, but not terribly surprising, is that many of the items on this list occurred more recently, meaning they hadn't had much time to be written about by 1989, but they've merited plenty of mentions since then.
Thanks for reading!
*Even if Google's tool were perfect, there's still the bias that historians/authors bring in choosing what events to write about. Also worth noting is that we're only looking at English-language books, so our notion of 'historically significant' is filtered quite drastically through that lens.
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